Not to be confused with the gigantic insect — the alienated man — of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the small-souled bugman is very much a ‘well-adjusted’, fully integrated neuron in today’s neoliberalist techno-corporate hive mind.

A consequence of a perilously overpopulated, brutally capitalistic, shamelessly hedonistic, morally decaying society, the humble bugman has come to define an age of technological dystopia in which everyone has everything — their gadgets, their fast foods, their fashion accessories — but somehow everyone also has nothing — no community, no natural spirit, no substance of mind. He is a zombified consumer, an emasculated wage slave, a vessel emptied of meaning and refilled with plastic, pixels and silicone.

He is what a sterile corporate wasteland spews out. Millions of him, almost exact replicas who are relentlessly told they are unique by clever marketers, and who believe it. He is a personality defined by brands, a blue-checkmarked Twitter user. Bugmen are what we get when a culture is infantilized, watered down and stripped of the very intellectual, philosophical and honourable fibre that once made it great. Totally dependent on the compromised support of his nanny state and high-tech devices, the bugman has been reduced to the status of a domestic animal. A 200-pound child.

And like a child, the bugman’s shallowness keeps him malleable to the fleeting whims and fads of a degenerate, smartphone-addicted, dopamine-hooked society. He bases his identity on passing trends that to him appear profound, priding himself on being a ‘step ahead’ of his peers — an ‘early adopter’ — not realizing it’s the marketer who’s always a step ahead of him. He is the millennial test subject, the lab rat brand loyalty experts are paid $20,000 an hour to pigeonhole. First in line for the latest Apple iPhone, he actively supports the unchecked rise of AI and notions of planetary relocation.

Things didn’t always look so bleak for the bugman. He grew up in fortunate circumstances. Middle-class parents who raised him well, sent him to a good college. Oversocialization afforded him effortless acceptance into a mentally sick civilization, but sorely missing, unbeknownst to him, was the lack of any meaningful struggle; the grueling initiations that turn boys into men. His mental development had been stunted in the real sense at the expense of engineering a successful and painless assimilation into a clown world fueled by idiocy, deception and frivolity.

The bugman now occupies one of two living situations. One, the city bugman lives atop, beneath and besides his fellow bugs in what is an actual human-scale bug colony, hence the name. Two, the suburban bugman living just as unnaturally and miserably, lined up in careful symmetry among neighbours he will never know and trees that will never grow, house by house, street by street, as far as the eye can see.

The deliberate draining of purpose and passion from the bugman’s soul made it easy to assign him without complaint to a vapid, good-boy ‘job’ and a ‘career’ that does little but prop up the demented corporatist structure. He is a willing cog in the grinding bullshit machine — a marketer, an analyst, a ‘project manager’ — or has perhaps handed his life over to preserving the insanity of the state by becoming a lawyer or a bureaucrat. Worse yet, he gobbled up the STEM dream sold by grubby toy merchants, dooming himself to an existence of zeroes and ones. Zero purpose. One sad bugman.

So cowed by his masters, the bugman is fiercely loyal to faceless corporations in what appears to be a society-wide occurrence of Stockholm syndrome. Terrified of being exposed as the fraud that he is, he hands over his mind to be reshaped like putty until it fits the robotic cubicle farm mould. Before long he is sending out 150 emails a day in which he promises to “touch base” and “leverage the data”. He’ll climb the imaginary ladder, all the while nagged by a vague sense of emptiness and a dormant rage that might see him off to an early grave.

Failing to find fulfilment in his work, the bugman has become fully immersed in Content, Digital Socializing and Entertainment. Facing the monumental task of salvaging his soul, he has instead resorted to seeking escape at every turn. He upgrades his 60” 4K TV to a 75” 4K TV. He buys more video games and a virtual reality set, finds a pot dealer and gets a prescription for anti-depressants.

An avid Netflix binger, cinema goer and Spotify subscriber, he echoes pretentious magazine reviews by referring to mediocre works of popular culture as “urgent” and “life-affirming”. Blinded by his inability to consume anything beneath the surface of spoon-fed, easily-digested, created-by-committee mainstream productions, he will never come to know the transcendence of actual genius — towering authors, musical virtuosos or glorious artists — stuff that might make his soul bigger.

The bugman’s diet is in equal parts nutritionally inadequate and inexplicably expensive. He has made eating an unnecessarily complicated act by falling for the mutually-marketed falsehoods that food can be improved with technology — see ‘health food’ snacks sold in recycled cardboard — and that preparing food properly is a waste of time and effort. Thus, everything he buys comes in packaging, produced in a lab, deviously salt or sugar-laden. Physical exercise is not part of his life, so the result is an atrophied muscular structure, formations of fatty tissue insulating his vital organs, and pale, flaky skin.

The bugman is intensely focused on making his life more ‘efficient’. If he outsources every chore and foregoes starting a family, he will have more time to consume and more time to whittle away on his pointless job and fashionable hobbies. He has his groceries delivered and asks Alexa to update him on the day’s news. Gamification via $3.99 apps has taken over virtually every aspect of his life. This, to the bugman, is progress.

When it comes to sports, bugmen can be neatly divided into two distinct groupings. Sports is either not part of his life — the nerdbug — or it is one of his defining characteristics — the jockbug. The latter, once a promising athlete, now watches on beer and betting slip-in-hand as blaring, sanitized SPORTS! is beamed into his retinas, relieving his brain of any signs of life that might have otherwise surfaced. Jockbugs have been known to spend as many as 30 hours a week consuming SPORTS!, and even more reading/talking about it.

Social media is the bugman’s public square. This is where he ‘debates’, makes jokes and flaunts his status and moral virtue to the hive. This is where he seeks respite from the alienation of modern life, but never quite seems to find it. He flicks through his Twitter feed aimlessly, chuckles along to Jimmy Kimmel clips on YouTube, and smugly describes himself as “socially liberal and fiscally conservative” in New York Times comments sections.

The bugman’s severe paucity of skepticism has led him down a mainstream media-saturated path of tech adulation, social justice fallacies and “progress”-at-all-costs morality. The dearth of historical, rational and spiritual context in his mind leaves only the possibility of suffering in the panicked bustle of the present day, antenna twitching in response to the prevailing Bad News.

The bugman cares little that the world has been irrevocably corrupted and damaged by Machiavellian technologists and shady bureaucrats. If he is not in fact one of them, he whole-buggedly buys into their UN-endorsed missions to bring about ‘world peace’, to ‘end poverty’, and other such feel-good nonsense. He is oblivious to the toxic impact of the corporations and globalist think tanks that exist purely to feed his consumerist impulses and create the economic artifice that sustains such behavior. He’s the archetypal useful idiot, keeping everything he thinks he stands against in perfect working order.

He conceals his intellectual cowardice amid ideological rhetoric and Orwellian newspeak. Cogent debate and the search for truth are challenges to his dominance of public discourse, so the bugman must become masterful at distorting arguments in a desperate attempt to portray himself as the well-reasoned and righteous party.

Beware of his powerful toolkit, including but not limited to virtue signalling, cries of “hate speech”, straw man arguments, and ad hominem attacks. This all sprouts from his fear of countering the ‘correct’ views of the day. If he simply parrots mainstream commentary, he can be sure of being on the right side of history.

Despite all the inhumanity and misery of a bugman’s life laid before you, be assured it is no mean feat to come across one in person who reveals his trauma. He will present himself invariably as polite, gentle, happy and ‘nice’. He is remarkably non-confrontational, avoiding controversy at virtually any cost. PC culture has him shaken, terrified of being ostracized for wrongthink. This is the bugman’s tough outer shell, and it will never be penetrated. Underneath this shell lies his small soul, searching fruitlessly for subsistence.

While he may carry himself with an air of intellectual and moral superiority, the bugman has stopped asking the big questions. He can distantly recall the sense of awe he felt as a child, those times looking up at the stars and the moon; those times reflecting on his ancestry, where he came from, the history and traditions of mankind and the wild beauty of Earth. Now his mind is so distracted by pixelated inanity, trash culture and his ridiculous job that he cannot, for the love of god, simply sit and think.

He can no longer be at peace or derive joy from nature and blissful simplicity. He feels frustration over his powerlessness to bring an end to the mysterious forces chipping away at his soul day by day, but does nothing about it. And so he remains, indefinitely and emphatically, a small-souled bugman.
Bugmen: What are they?
Posted on 12/11/2017 by metanomad
What is a Bugman?

Aesthetically they’re much like their name, bug-eyed, jittery and insect-like, their very demeanour often makes one’s skin crawl. You’re more than likely surrounded by hoards of these bovine-esque people in day-to-day life. Culturally of course they’re near impossible to pin down for they cut all cultural roots at the base in fear of representation with the past. Politically many say bugmen are ‘left-leaning’ yet I’d argue the case that any affiliation with politics is entirely with the curve of the populous and thus the Bugmen – at present – inject themselves routinely with viral strains of progressivism, neoliberalism and (especially) democracy. Projected from this ambivalent attitude towards history and politics comes anti-empathetical extroversions with regard to tradition, myth, folklore, spirituality and interest, all of which, when positioned in relation to a bugman are used only alongside heavy doses of postmodernist irony. The simple matter of fact is they have zero respect or tolerance for anything antiquated or traditional, the most minor of historic morsels that doesn’t actively sell itself to them or project their personal vision of infantile-tech-utopia is cast aside. Philosophically the bugman is relatively confused, often mistaking logic, reason and rationale with one another, and replacing the idea of basic causality with their own drawn-out narcissistic assessment attempts: “Look at me, I’ve got it all figured out.” the bugman says internally.

Before you sits the social nervous system of the bugman true, a sordid mixture of fad-reverence and capitalist-lite binging. On closer inspection of the day to day life of a bugman one finds at its core the implementation of social erosion, everything that is taken from its origin is likewise bastardized into a regressive, virtual, stir-crazy version of its former self: eSports, Fantasy Football, Copy ‘n Paste Vidya (à la Bethesda/Ubisoft), New Atheism, Beards-as-personality, etc. each of these characteristics is of course filtered through the latest piece of cutting-edge high-brand technology the bugman can afford. One may have noticed already that bugmen’s ‘personalities’ are nothing more than the accumulation and composition of various popular brand names, technologies, TV shows, bands etc. The bugman is entirely defined by that which they consume. Thus the bugmen easily assimilate into their own groups, for their archetypes and traits are based off material possessions, as such grouping is quick, painless and has the added benefit of instantaneous conversation: “Sweet mechanical keyboard dude!”

There is of course a difference between a regular consumer and a bugman, there has to be, for everyone consumes. Whereas a consumer will buy a basket of groceries which they plan on eating, the bugman will purchase retro foods, meme-drinks and ironic status-tokens as a means to display the fact that they are indeed ‘in-on-it’. A consumer will buy the box-set of their favourite TV show because they genuinely enjoyed the viewing, perhaps they’ll watch 3-4 episodes a week around other commitments, a bugman on the other hand subscribes to multiple streaming services and binges series after series in the ever expanding quest for acceptance, when asked how they found Stranger Things, Rick & Morty, Bojack Horseman, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones etc. the bugman does not offer insight into their personal opinion, only regurgitates a titbit or quote from the series as a means to display their virtue of consumption. “I too have seen the thing you have!” A network of insects whose lives are routinely controlled by ratings: theirs and others. They must advance their rating by subsuming the other which is rated highly. ‘Everyone liked this, so if I like this, everyone will like me!”

Identity and consumption merge within the bugman. Hobbies become traits in the lives of bugmen. Treating their lives like as if they were an RPG minmaxer, attempting to reach peak efficiency when it comes to popularity, assimilation and acceptance. Spewing spools of popular quotes, band-names, aphorisms and social tics, the bugman is a walking media depository incapable of its own creation. Bugmen’s ‘own’ thoughts are merely misshapen combinations of that which they’ve taken in. Revelling in their ironic displays of lower case postmodern hyperbole and sardonic middle class humour. Sincerity an impossibility for worry of social suffocation, and daft humour avoided for fear of ostracisation. When a bugman sprouts anew, the previous form of personal agency commits seppuke out of respect for others. That jittery man whose bulbous eyes are darting to and fro, the one in line for the new iPhone, that’s a bugman, consumed by the idea of being first in a line of consumers, any possibility of escape is negated by the perpetual oppression and quasi-innovations of consumerism. Just as the man’s soul glimpses at the sight of a beloved memory, his perception picks up an advert, and so the memory fades into non-existence.
Good, but needs more cross-cultural analysis. I’ve met a bugman type from a fairly different country/culture (though still within the broad sphere of USG influence). I had no idea about their pattern of consumption, which likely was much different from your typical Brooklynite or San Franciscan. They probably rarely never ate avocado toast and never watched the games or shows the bugmen from the US watch. Yet there was something that struck me as “bugmen-like” about them — the meekness, the adherence to “proper” social opinion that they undoubtedly absorbed from watching other “proper” types like themselves express, the lack of rational/causal thinking “from first principles,” the need to be accepted by the group of similar well-educated “proper” types, the end-of-history-type confidence that *they* represent the evolved type (despite the stunningly de-evolved characteristics), etc.
I believe I have met some. Hopefully “the bugman” as described in this article doesn’t really exist, but the engineering department at my college was chock full of these kinds of fuckers.
Philistine lowbrow souless zombie proles, that’s all they are. No sense of Beauty, Art and Aesthetics. Last of the Last Men. Can’t get any worse than that, they’re insects, monkeys are superior, they seem to have more of an urge to improve themselves.

Living for Content is Consumerism at its worst. It’s a virus, it’s a tiranny, it’s enslavement; it’s the end of mankind, art and culture with zero exaggeration. The more one believes I am exaggerating, the more one is a souless zombie. Most people think I am exaggerating. They think I am a snob, full of myself, arrogant, delusional…THEY are.