I have recently been looking into a rather cult-like phenomenon currently unfolding on the internet, and I have yet to find any information regarding this phenomenon on CEI so I felt that an informative post here was in order.
At it’s center is Bachir Boumaaza, better known by his online pseudonym Athene, a rather prolific internet gaming personality from Belgium that had an explosive rise to popularity back in 2007 by posting comedic videos to YouTube of him playing World of Warcraft and bragging about being the worlds best player of the game.
While all the bragging of his great gaming skills was mostly for comedic effect, there was absolutely some grain of validity to his claim of calling himself the best gamer in the world, and for many years after his rise to internet fame he was often competing at the highest level in different aspects of different online games and he was also a quite successful online poker player for a time.
Around 2011 he almost completely vanished from the internet for a while, only hinting at big things to come in the near future, and after keeping his fans waiting for a while he finally came back to the spotlight claiming to having spent his time studying scientific fields such as neuroscience and quantum mechanics and having come up with a verifiable unification theory of physics, a theory he explained in this 50 minute “documentary” posted to his YouTube channel.
He has no formal education in any scientific field, and yet he claimed to have achieved expert level knowledge in several of the most abstract and hard-to-reach scientific fields there is, and also to have done it in basically no time at all, resulting in an, at best pseudo scientific, at worst willfully dishonest, unification theory built to mask his true message of “god being in the neurons”.
During his time as an internet famous person he has actually managed to do some good in the form of raising quite a lot of money for charity and through that he has even occasionally pierced the veil into mainstream media, being interview on CNN and Bloomberg and also doing TEDx talks.
But ever since his short hiatus back in 2011, and his subsequent return with his newly acquired “knowledge” he seem to have slowly started to form a more formal system of thought and a cult-like setting around himself, and at this stage the similarities with something like the Manson Family is now starting to come to the light.
His philosophy revolves around his own definition of logic, a definition that is quite fuzzy and hard to follow at the best of times, and the end goal of this system of thinking using his brand of logic is the achievement of an epiphany, called the “Click”, leading to an nirvana-like mental state that he promises will relive you of all your worries and problems, and all the usual mambo-jumbo.
He is quite fond of like himself to the likes of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Einstein, even proclaiming that he is the most intelligent person to have ever lived, and that his intelligence dwarfs all of the previously named people.
His main channel of spreading his philosophy is through his live stream on internet gaming live streaming service Twitch, from which he was recently banned after being suspected of involvement in some sort of scam, and he has said some truly narcissistic things there, for example that he is certain the the whole world will be following his philosophy in as little as 5 years, and that all poverty will then be ended.
Now, my previous hint at the Manson Family is not a completely vacuous claim made to peak peoples interest, because as of writing this Athene is currently living in a huge mansion in Germany, sometimes referred to as “The Compound”, close to the Polish border together with his girlfriend and some other people that has been instrumental to his businesses since the beginning.
They are actively recruiting people to come live with them in order to help them “Click” and in order to work together to spread the philosophy, and their collective living situation seems to be slowly growing.
They apparently have some rather strict rules that everyone has to adhere to, such as that everyone needs to maintain a vegan diet, and something that I have heard referred to as the “three hug rule” that I have yet to figure out the true purpose and meaning of.
The situation is getting more and more surreal for every day that passes, and I cant shake the feeling of a cult is actually taking shape in front of my eyes, and that this cult seem to feed off a previously largely untapped pool of potential victims in online gamers.
Being a gamer myself I hesitate to reinforce the stereotypes of gamers being socially awkward and reclusive people with few to no friends, but the truth is that these people are quite numerous under the gamer epithet, and I fear that these are the people being lured into this.
Here are some links relating to the “Clicking movement”:
Reddit
Wiki
Official site for the "compound"
Soundcloud
At it’s center is Bachir Boumaaza, better known by his online pseudonym Athene, a rather prolific internet gaming personality from Belgium that had an explosive rise to popularity back in 2007 by posting comedic videos to YouTube of him playing World of Warcraft and bragging about being the worlds best player of the game.
While all the bragging of his great gaming skills was mostly for comedic effect, there was absolutely some grain of validity to his claim of calling himself the best gamer in the world, and for many years after his rise to internet fame he was often competing at the highest level in different aspects of different online games and he was also a quite successful online poker player for a time.
Around 2011 he almost completely vanished from the internet for a while, only hinting at big things to come in the near future, and after keeping his fans waiting for a while he finally came back to the spotlight claiming to having spent his time studying scientific fields such as neuroscience and quantum mechanics and having come up with a verifiable unification theory of physics, a theory he explained in this 50 minute “documentary” posted to his YouTube channel.
He has no formal education in any scientific field, and yet he claimed to have achieved expert level knowledge in several of the most abstract and hard-to-reach scientific fields there is, and also to have done it in basically no time at all, resulting in an, at best pseudo scientific, at worst willfully dishonest, unification theory built to mask his true message of “god being in the neurons”.
During his time as an internet famous person he has actually managed to do some good in the form of raising quite a lot of money for charity and through that he has even occasionally pierced the veil into mainstream media, being interview on CNN and Bloomberg and also doing TEDx talks.
But ever since his short hiatus back in 2011, and his subsequent return with his newly acquired “knowledge” he seem to have slowly started to form a more formal system of thought and a cult-like setting around himself, and at this stage the similarities with something like the Manson Family is now starting to come to the light.
His philosophy revolves around his own definition of logic, a definition that is quite fuzzy and hard to follow at the best of times, and the end goal of this system of thinking using his brand of logic is the achievement of an epiphany, called the “Click”, leading to an nirvana-like mental state that he promises will relive you of all your worries and problems, and all the usual mambo-jumbo.
He is quite fond of like himself to the likes of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Einstein, even proclaiming that he is the most intelligent person to have ever lived, and that his intelligence dwarfs all of the previously named people.
His main channel of spreading his philosophy is through his live stream on internet gaming live streaming service Twitch, from which he was recently banned after being suspected of involvement in some sort of scam, and he has said some truly narcissistic things there, for example that he is certain the the whole world will be following his philosophy in as little as 5 years, and that all poverty will then be ended.
Now, my previous hint at the Manson Family is not a completely vacuous claim made to peak peoples interest, because as of writing this Athene is currently living in a huge mansion in Germany, sometimes referred to as “The Compound”, close to the Polish border together with his girlfriend and some other people that has been instrumental to his businesses since the beginning.
They are actively recruiting people to come live with them in order to help them “Click” and in order to work together to spread the philosophy, and their collective living situation seems to be slowly growing.
They apparently have some rather strict rules that everyone has to adhere to, such as that everyone needs to maintain a vegan diet, and something that I have heard referred to as the “three hug rule” that I have yet to figure out the true purpose and meaning of.
The situation is getting more and more surreal for every day that passes, and I cant shake the feeling of a cult is actually taking shape in front of my eyes, and that this cult seem to feed off a previously largely untapped pool of potential victims in online gamers.
Being a gamer myself I hesitate to reinforce the stereotypes of gamers being socially awkward and reclusive people with few to no friends, but the truth is that these people are quite numerous under the gamer epithet, and I fear that these are the people being lured into this.
Here are some links relating to the “Clicking movement”:
Wiki
Official site for the "compound"
Soundcloud