Criminology professor at Douglas College and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver who researches radicalization, terrorism, extremism and extremist media strategy; author of the novel Troll (2023). He came on to discuss masks, online identity and the state of literature.
Where it appears 1
Connections
Wrote
Located in
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Stories told
- Petrol's origin in Logan's own fear
Peter Riley's starting point, the terror of an ordinary nine-to-five life and the sense of being destined for more, came from Logan at 19. He now calls that view naive, though it felt very…
- Logan's first attempts at meditation
Raised online with a 'partially fried' brain, Logan couldn't sit in silence for more than a couple of minutes when he started meditating a few years ago before getting restless and edgy. It…
- The drama teacher lifted from life
A minor character in Troll, Peter's drama teacher, is a one-to-one copy of Logan's own drama teacher, Wesley, whose style Logan lifted wholesale. Logan gives him a shout-out on air.
Words spoken
I wouldn't mind feeling so sad if I knew how to meme it better. Honestly, I think that's probably why I get so sad in the first place.
We're so used to putting so much of ourselves out there that for people to step back and say, I'm just going to be with myself for a minute and my thoughts and my confessions, totally detached from everybody else, is not something that a lot of people even see the purpose in doing. It's like if it's not on the internet, it doesn't exist.
At the end of the day it's kind of like a paint by numbers. You're creating this picture, but it doesn't really have your signature on it.
Sometimes when I'm alone at night and there's that brief silence in between videos, something comes over me and I just feel like crying. Sometimes I do.
Never accept the philosophies of fatalism, defeatism or nihilism. The survival of our people is reliant upon your ability to not give up even against seemingly impossible odds. Your ancestors survived and persevered so that you could be here today; you owe it to the future generations to do the same.
Have those masks become grafted to our face in such a way where removing them is not as easy as it used to be in a pre-connected world?
I've been ordering a bunch of stuff from Amazon and I get super excited when the packages show up, but lately I feel weird like two minutes after opening them. Like, sad, I guess.
At the end of the day there's something inside them that's missing. For some of them they fill that hole with Funko Pops and video games; for some of them they fill that with darker things and go in much darker directions.
In a lot of ways it's amplified these things, but it also means that we're never really fully able to step away from the performance.
The truer confession, the one you're talking about, is maybe the one that nobody sees. It's the one that you're writing for yourself.