About "A Love Letter to Thomas Crooks"
"A Love Letter to Thomas Matthew Crooks."
2024, Digital Painting, Collage, A0 Print.
Do you solemnly swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth?
the thing about information
it cannot be delivered at such a fast rate
information is a slow release XR
you love pain like me you're a masochist,
but we cannot live this way.
C-19 Viral Sniper © 2001 Born in Hell
When I was in High School (2017) my English Teacher noticed I was bringing cigarettes to school.
He seemed to operate on different laws compared to the other teachers - reaching into my bag to inspect them further.
“Marlborough Reds huh?”
Though rather than confiscating them, as I said, he seemed to believe in freedom of choice. He put them back into my bag and encouraged me to choose better for the sake of my health. You have to desire change to do so.
I became compelled by this display of a break in the system. The repetition is what depleted my dopamine to begin with, causing me to smoke at 16.
The way addiction works is quite similar, as it hijacks the reward system. The term “Mythical reel pull” derives from this mechanism.
Slot Machines use a similar method to Tiktok Algorithms, you are hunting for information.
So this “break” that I was compelled by caused me to further investigate what kind of person he was.
One day in class I asked if he wrote any of his own poetry since he taught Literature. He brought over his computer and showed me a piece he wrote about a man he’d attended University with who died via suicide. His name was Jeremy.
He spoke about the last time he saw him. He thought often about going back in time and stopping him in the hallway. How he thought about him for weeks after that. He questioned why exactly he could not stop thinking about him.
And the conclusion he arrived at — well,
he realised he was a reflection of himself.
He too was suicidal.
“And the hate builds within him and he looks up to God.
I hate you, he thinks. I hate you so much.
But then he cries. There in his room he cries.
Drops of tears dripping like blood into his palms forming a small pool.
He is in his hands.
Then the full realisation hits him. And he knows he is loved.
Love; the word sings. And there is joy. And there is self-control of his thoughts and feelings.
And there is patience. And there is faithfulness towards life. And there is kindness towards others.
And there is Love. From who cares and knows him best. Who understands and forgives.
And there is love for the one who was lost, and he thinks,
for the one who saved me; Jeremy.”
He knew I was suicidal.
He was one of those people you couldn’t get to know in 5 minutes.
I showed this poem to a friend of mine. @siamesefeverdreams on Instagram, which has since been taken down by the FBI.
She died 2 years later.
[Neurology, Psychiatry, "" "", "", harvesting information.] Such as the equation goes.
[Screenshots of GPT builder]
Does a part of me actually feel compelled to Thomas Matthew Crooks? Well, I never knew him.
[Screenshot of his chat history]
[Video of him saying he's 6 foot]
What is love anyway? If you love someone you are to combine neural networks, if the equations work well enough you are to become one mind.
You trust them to extend your vision. And if you really love them, you'll procreate with the intention of your combined mind walking the earth long after you die.
I told you, I'm no good with the definition.
When I think of love, I can only feel as far as nothing.
Can only feel like it exists as directly as it would from a dead man.
We are all made of love, some made of strange variations. You could consider thanking Einstein's theory of relativity for that. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
[Sean Carroll quantum love]
[FIRST PAINTING MADE time and date]
[SECOND PAINTING MADE time and date]
I cannot deny, he demonstrated freedom. The very thing they all argue about. Everyone in that abhorrently moderated country they call America, constantly arguing, constantly filling the air with noise. They sit and let it happen. Exactly how they like them. If you wonder why the commentary of this event is so messed up, try trace it back to the initial source. The FBI struggles to figure out exactly what the motivations of Thomas Matthew Crooks were, because they assume he had some kind of radical motivation. It shocked his family, I believe it.
[Sol Pais Father comments]
[Thomas Matthew Crooks family comments]
Sometimes people just simply want to make others happy. I heard Lex Fridman say once, those who do evil believe they are doing something good from their own perspective. So who is the conducting source of the radical motivation?
[Lex Fridman and Evil]
341 million Americans. He seems to be the only person who took matters into his own hands. A fine demonstration of the butterfly effect. One bullet with a 50:50 chance, two entirely different timelines for the world. Don't blame me, I'm not the president, I'm not William J. Burns. I'm just an artist typing into a terminal.
What's the oldest social engineering trick in the book? Misinformation. So why do you believe them when they tell you what to do with your life?
"Stop sweet-talking, tell him how you feel"
— Malcolm X
[Initial piece]
[Assassination]
So do I love him or not?
He was a socially removed computer science student, who was rejected from the rifle team for his comically bad aim.
If you are an introverted software engineer, you listen to people instead of speaking. He could understand the way a system worked. He flew a drone over the rally in preparation for the attack.
[Kali Linux: the quieter you are, the more you are able to hear.]
I let the algorithm build these pieces.
A week before the assassination, I made a playlist called ‘viral sniper’ and let the algorithm build it.
I wanted to see if it would work. Could I use the algorithim to indirectly predict the future through statistics?
viral sniper
He was isolated, simultaneously too aware of the gaze of others. Well the eyes lead right to the soul don't they? And we are a network with our own respective identities, correct?
He demonstrated a freedom 341 million did not. He is human heroin to someone like me.
Some people, just want others to be happy. So they can leave them be.
######https://youtu.be/g1_V_4sMoOg?si=sL3b_o5FhxY5zpeP
No living man needs to be burdened by my love. It's possible I don't love him at all, and I'm actually in love with dying.
[Video of meg with dead boy next to train tracks]
Did you ever hear of the Grandmaster who found a homeless Savant with a chessboard?
The savant said he would only verse him once. The Grandmaster loses immediately.
He begs for a rematch. The Savant finally agrees, beats him in even fewer moves than before.
He picks up his chessboard and storms off. The Grandmaster begs him to tell him how he did it.
He tells him to go fuck himself.
I did not choose better for the sake of my health. The sheer arrogance of youth.
I’ve always been somewhat of a “hacker” (stupid term). And I knew I was doing something wrong at the time, I just didn’t realize how incredibly lazy that would make me.
At 23 years of age, any time something is asked of me, I find the laziest possible way to do it. I break a five-step procedure into three, but I eat only half of my cereal and tell myself it was two quarters.
I remember hacking so many of my friends’ Facebook accounts in intermediate and college, reading all of their messages containing my name to see what they truly think of me, never telling them I read their messages but distancing myself anyway.
I was texting this guy at a sleepover in 2014 with these girls I didn’t know all that well, and one of them wouldn’t stop glaring at me. I stood behind her, filmed her putting in her pin, hid her phone until she left the room, read her messages—and she was talking to the same guy I was.
She was like “is she your girlfriend?” He was like “nah, I don’t know her.” Ten years later, he told me he was in love with me.
I was like, “I thought you didn’t know me.”
He argued that was 10 years ago, but I’d already gotten what I needed.
It became a compulsion. Once I knew there was shadowing information that existed at all times, everything people said to me eventually became artificial speech. I hacked half the class of 2018.
I built a web of information concerning the student body by 16, and I was bored. So I began hacking the teachers.
As an adolescent, I’d correct the teacher. As a teenager, I would hack the teacher. Both times feeling so proud of myself. Feeling so validated.
One of the teachers was a pedophile. So I didn’t feel bad about doing this to him.
My family would always tell me, “We teach you these things so you use them in good faith.”
I’d discovered a loophole to what they’d conditioned me to follow. I’d happily oblige to the rules, but—some of them just felt like they were keeping bad people safe.
I’d use the fact that I was a girl, and he was obviously preying on me in class, to socially engineer his computer password.
When he was away from his computer, I’d log into the KAMAR portal. A system full of extensive lists concerning personal information of anyone in association with the school.
Hacking iClouds, emails, Facebook. Being able to track their entire digital footprint.
At one point, it was in good faith. I was being lied to by others. Then it just became an agenda. I could doxx any teacher or student.
[source: 'Permanent Record' by Edward Snowden]
Which is what a government is to do, right?
Overlook and moderate a system of people. Within good faith.
I didn't graduate.
The arrogance to believe I was any better for outsmarting them. Feeling so validated for being able to achieve something they could not.
Yet I sat outside the hall and listened to them celebrate. I saw the photographs of people smiling with their families. They also had something I did not.
Well, there was a guy in my class, and his father was an attorney as well. I hated him. I hated the entitlement he felt to be able to speak over the teacher. I hated the way he would boast about his achievements. I felt anger when he would exhibit joy.
We would argue about anything we could possibly find error in. We would debate to the point of stopping the class until one of us was crying. We were the most argumentative, opinionated brats in the class.
One day his parents got divorced, and he came up to me and admitted he felt a deep sadness towards life. We were the same, and he was only the way he was to please others. He identified it to be his worst burden.
So I’d purposely sit with him, and he would sit with me regardless of the behavior we’d display.
But I still believed it was only him with troubles, and I was some kind of lawless entity free of interference. He’d tell me a lot of people wanted to be my friend; it was me who refused to let them be.
The narcissism to justify this habit of hacking for years, telling myself it was because of the way people would betray me—yet the entire time, they wanted me there regardless. We were just kids.
Seven years later, from the day my teacher showed me that poem about Jeremy, I am confiding in my two best friends about how I want to die.
One of them sits outside with me, and we share a joint. He tells me the point of life is to continue in our ascendance, to enjoy the journey of development.
“Some people, well, excellence is required of them no matter what,” he says.
“They have a reason to strive for a higher academic understanding. My higher purpose is my son. I need to continue learning so I am able to solve problems he encounters throughout life.”
After I told my friends about my suicidal ideations, I went to grab my dinner. My nephew was hanging by the door.
He said, unbeknownst to my sadness, “You know, those claw machines at the supermarket are rigged.”
It’s kids like him I do this for.
"just touched home from the motive,
Text get home safely to Anna.
I see man have got plenty to say when I'm out
but they never ever say when the gang are.
Can't take man for a spanner,
next time man I'm taking a dagger.
She was like 'Babes, wait, stop it'
Weren't gonna ching man.
I was just bluffing,
but I can't just stand there discussing.
'Least not in front of Anna."