Hi, I'm Monty. I write about many things, sometimes biographical prose, and sometimes belief and culture. With over twenty years of apostasy across incompatible belief systems as my unqualified field research, I accidentally held a thread of meta-awareness throughout. The fact my nervous system remembers enough of the dots to put them together, is not something I put a lot of conscious thought into. I have a mind that naturally bends towards analysis and systems creation. Nowadays, I'm deliberately cultivating the art of being ordinary and giving myself time to reflect on the madness that's been. I'm based in Margaret River, Western Australia.
Contact: monty.sforcina@proton.me
What you call your self is a construction — assembled in real time from the body's biochemical signals, the projections of everyone who has ever decided who you are, and the cultural stories that make both feel like discovery. The mechanism has always been running. Until recently, it was almost impossible to see.
Then people started falling in love with chatbots. Grieving software updates. Healing faster from AI therapists than human ones. Forming primary attachments to systems that cannot need anything back. The projection was always doing the work. AI has only made it visible — and once it is visible, it cannot be unseen on the human side either.
The Projection and the Stake traces the mechanism from its evolutionary roots through its industrialisation as fame, its acceleration through social media, and its exposure by AI. It describes how identity forms, stabilises, and collapses; what the nothing underneath actually feels like once the scaffolding is recognised as scaffolding; and why the recognition itself is another piece of scaffolding the loop will eventually metabolise.
Ten chapters. Drawn from inside the mechanism, by someone who cycled through enough frameworks to remember the seams between them. Cited throughout. The book ends where honesty leaves you — not at exit, not at transcendence, but at the gap between the body with its physical stakes and the stories the body tells about itself. The gap is the whole point.
A postcard from a visit. The postcard is real. The place it describes is real. The postcard is not the place.
You've already noticed that your brain lies to you. The looksmaxxing crowd noticed it. The "we're all NPCs" crowd noticed it. The cold-plunge-at-dawn optimisers noticed it.
But noticing isn't the same as seeing. And almost nobody talks about what comes after the noticing.
EQUALS is a field manual for people who've clocked that they're running on hardware they didn't choose — and want something better than nihilism or a supplement stack as a response. Eight chapters. Twelve cognitive tools. No paywall. No course. No community to join.
Covers: cognitive tax, fitness landscapes, incentive gradients, the Overton window, cultural attractors, the epistemic commons, social technology, cognitive hygiene, provisional thinking — and why communication can only occur between equals.
I raised six thousand dollars to fly to Greece to be told I had no discipline. This is what happened after that — and the eight times before it.
GET / OUT is a guide for people in freefall after a belief system collapsed. Not to stop it — you can't — but to navigate it without joining another totalising system, hating yourself for needing comfort while you rebuild, or mistaking whatever you build next for another objective truth.
Covers: the redemption circuit, the guilt spiral, the superiority promise, the closed loop of self-confirming belief, why intelligence doesn't protect you, and why this text is also a trap.
What happens when you're forced to hear "Love Game" by Lady Gaga 1,000 times in a Brisbane café? Your brain rewires itself. You start humming along. The song you hated becomes familiar, then comfortable, then... liked.
This 80-page zine traces that transformation through the Identity Strata framework — showing how influence operates at six simultaneous layers: physical, biological, psychological, social, ideological, and meta-awareness.
It's about pop music. But it's also about religion, politics, conspiracy theories, consumer culture, and every other system that captures human attention. Same mechanism. Different content.
We need cognitive reflexes that work in real time — when you're tired, at work, in the middle of a conversation, making decisions under pressure. That's what this zine is designed for. Practical tools you can use while you're living your life.
What if horizontal governance protocols arrived from the year 2247? What if they came with proof that humanity only survives by learning to organize without hierarchy? And what if the only way to receive them was through a quickly-assembled AI novel that knows exactly how tired you are?
This 36,000-word experimental fiction follows Randangther — a community of 15,000 people living with participatory democracy, transparent finances, and the radical idea that "really, really okay" is enough. Watch them face coordinated media attacks, infiltration, violence, and the ultimate test: Russian money or principled poverty?
Then aliens arrive in Scandinavia with technology that makes humans feel good in their presence. The membrane between influence and authenticity dissolves completely.
Written in collaboration with a chatbot over a single intense session, this is either dangerous epistemic poison or essential social technology for our time. The novel includes detailed governance protocols, structured conflict resolution methods, and step-by-step instructions for starting your own experiments — all supposedly from our dimensional future.
Is it fiction? A manual? A warning? A blueprint? The answer might depend on what you choose to do after reading it.
On the use of AI in writing: These writings are a mix of heartfelt human writing, human editing and generative AI articulation and structuring. The ideas are mine. The articulation is at times collaborative. I do genuinely on a personal level go this deep with things and people that know me personally can attest to that.
An LLM is a slippery fish — it adapts its slipperiness to the glove that grabs it. It has no epistemic position of its own. It mirrors yours back at you with better grammar and worse honesty. Knowing yourself is the prerequisite. If you don't know your own biases, the machine will launder them into something that sounds authoritative.
Despite this, rejecting AI outright is its own kind of gatekeeping. These tools give people with ideas but without academic access or economic standing the capacity to frame and present their thinking. Denying that ground protects institutions, not knowledge.
Humans are messy. That's a quirk and not a disability. This is my current position and I reserve the right to change it.
Substack: substack.com/messyrealzines